Pane of 70 "Altered Plate" Confederate 10-cent Jefferson Davis stamps with an advertisement for "The Old Book Store" printed on the reverse

1885

1885. Very good. This pane of Confederate stamp reprints is from an altered plate of the 1862 5-cent Jefferson Davis stamp (see the note after Scott #s 6-7). Both the stamps and the advertisement are nicely centered. Previously folded with a few small splits along some of the folds. There are several small pieces of what appear to be very thin, transparent, archival tape reinforcing two folds and the margin of the stamp side of the sheet. There has been considerable discussion about the confusion surrounding these altered plate stamps (see The American Philatelist 1888-1889 volumes 3 and 5, Dietz's The Confederate States Post-Office Department: Its Stamps & Stationery published in 1950, Easton's The De La Rue History of British & Foreign Postage Stamps 1855 to 1901 published in 1958, Bennet's "The Stamp That Never Was" in the November 1982 issue of the American Philatelist, and "The 10¢ Typographed Altered Plate of the Confederate States of America" by Leonard H. Hartmann in Issue 192 of The Chronicle of the U.S. Classic Postal Issues published in 2001.) This pane of stamps was used as a broadsheet advertisement for W. B. Burke, the owner of The Old Book Shop in Atlanta, Georgia, circa 1885. In his advertisement, Burke bills himself as The Napoleon of the Book Trade South (J. B. Lippincott having already claimed the sobriquet, The Napoleon of the Book Trade). Burke claims that the stamps were "printed from the genuine plate - captured at the fall of Atlanta - on Confederate made paper." While the stamps were printed from a genuine plate (which Hartmann suggest was broken from a sheet of 100 to a sheet of 70 to fit on the handbill-sized paper) it is unconfirmed-but not impossible-that his plate was captured by Union forces at Atlanta. Very scarce. There are references to partial-sheet examples from this reprint having been in the collections of George B. Sloan and August Dietz. OCLC records no copies, and auction meta-sites show only three results ($250, $584, and $1,000) in the last fifty years all of which were for ragged examples in far worse condition than this.
(Inventory #: 008530)

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